“As Commander-in-Chief, I will ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”
I remember writing those words. Not for Kamala Harris, though these are her version. But for Bill Clinton in the 1990s. We called them the “inoculation” words. The words that would protect him from criticism that he was anti-military, a draft dodger from the war in Vietnam. Now they have become a Democratic legacy, handed down president-by-resident, to protect his political flank. Now they are intended to protect hers.
They take me back to the war in Vietnam, as debates about American foreign policy and the use of the nation’s military often do. Back to the reality that, since 1945, America’s wars have been losing wars, with one exception (Gulf War 1991). Back to the political reality that anyone who opposes the profligate use of American military force around the world is not a “man,” not tough enough to deploy and fight in the defense of America.
I have been reflecting on that history, my history.
That’s where we were sixty years ago, as the American military presence in Vietnam began to grow. Grow, at first, as the wagging tail of America’s intelligence penetration into the internal affairs of South Vietnam. Grow as the nation slept while the Kennedy administration slipped “advisors” into South Vietnam, to be followed by a growing volume of regular forces.
Growing, yes, as some of us began to get a whiff of this escalation and, ourselves, grow in opposition to the notion that military force was vitally necessary to defeat communism in a small country that had been resisting colonial and neo-colonial intrusion for decades.
For every American male, regardless of class, ethnicity, or education, born from 1941 (me) to 1955 (several million others), Vietnam was a searing experience. I can pour a lot of feeling into that war: shame, disappointment, anger – even today, my whole bag of intense feelings can explode around Vietnam. I still carry a visceral rage about the stupidity, injustice, abuse, and, above all, the knowledge, then and now, that we were being lied to, manipulated, befogged by policy makers and politicians, and, for damn sure, deceived.
Vietnam became “the War” for my generation, like World War II was for my father’s generation. The war pain is buried deep in the soul of every American male my age I talk to. Along with the battle over the civil rights of Black Americans, a disproportionate share of whom were sent to Vietnam, the war was the seminal experience of our young lives.
And it changed the course of my life. I came into the sixties a conservative, conforming young man, a clean-shaven young Republican, who handed out Ike and Dick literature on the streets of his hometown in 1952, who organized phone banks for Nixon-Lodge in 1960. Who was determined to become a professor.
And then came Vietnam. Ironically, it was Armistice Day, November 11, 1963 when I turned against the war. At the age of 21, I rode in a yellow school bus with 40 other students from 19 countries, on a guided tour of World War I battlefields near Ypres, Belgium. “The war to end all wars,” it was called. In the back of the bus I read Le Monde, where a French reporter described the direct involvement of the US embassy in Saigon in the coup that led to the death of the South Vietnamese president and his brother at the hands of the South Vietnamese military. It was eight years, and a lot of dead Americans and Vietnamese, before the American people knew this.
I knew, then, this was a bad idea and, in my view, utterly inappropriate for the US to be doing, which only proved my naiveté. As I worked my way up the first stairs of the ladder in the national security world, I began to learn and have growing doubts.
It was another nine years before my opposition to the war cost me my job. On the way, my Member of Congress told me over lunch “I don’t make foreign policy for the President,” to explain why he supported LBJ’s decision to escalate the US presence in 1965. McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor, sat at his desk and told six of us graduate students privileged to meet with him, that we did not take seriously the threat Ho Chi Minh (the North Vietnamese president) and his forces posed to stability throughout South East Asia.
The student movement was saying otherwise. Demonstrations against the war began to grow. Events in 1968 crystalized this opposition into a mass movement, LBJ’s decision not to run for a full second term, the riots and turmoil of the Chicago Democratic Convention, and Richard Nixon’s victory. He would bring peace, he promised, and then continued the war more covertly for another six years.
I opposed this war. And I was protected from the draft by student deferments; having it both ways, straddling, as I headed to a college teaching career. In December 1967 I was reclassified 1A – eligible for the draft. America’s idea of manhood reared up. What did “manhood” expect? Saddle up, shave my hair, learn to fire a rifle? Real men went to war for their country, didn’t they?
Was I scared? Yes, the thought of going to the jungles of Vietnam, bearing a rifle, risking my life, was terrifying. One of my high school classmates had died in a helicopter crash, training for the war. I didn’t want to go, not then, not ever. Anybody not afraid of war is a fool, especially in the military.
To some the war became a test of “manhood” and patriotism. If you didn’t go, we were told, you were a “draft dodger,” not a man. The critique of Clinton. What was brave? Enlisting, carrying a rifle? Ducking away through a student deferment? Going into the military, but being sure to use privilege to get a cushy assignment in DC? Or resisting the war.
I straddled. I would try to change my draft board’s mind and if that failed, my spouse and I would become Swedes. Changing the board’s mind was a testament to privilege; I stayed an American. And vigorously contested the war.
I remember standing in the middle of the lobby of the Pennsylvania Station Hotel in New York in 1969 in an emotional shouting match with another graduate student friend, who insisted that Defense Secretary Robert McNamara’s idea of an electronic barrier along the Ho Chi Minh train could prevent North Vietnam from resupplying and sending fighters to the struggle in South Vietnam.
The action that changed the direction my life was the invasion and bombing of Cambodia in 1970. I was a young assistant professor at Columbia. Along with others, I moved my classes to the lawn, where we talked about the war and the death of four Kent State students shot by the national guard during a war protest in Ohio.
As we talked, a graduate student asked if I would be willing to speak against the war and in support of a group of physics students occupying the physics building. From a platform outside the building, I castigated Nixon and Kissinger, and the physics faculty for participating in the Jason Project, which helped design that failure of an electronic barrier on the Ho Chi Minh trail.
That speech cost me my job and changed my life. The senior member of the department, leaned over his desk, pointing his index finger at me, saying “You will get six years here, like every assistant professor. But you will never get tenure at this university.” I was fired. Not for opposing the war, but for supporting the illegal building occupation, an even more egregious sin, I guess.
That firing sent me on a different course in life: several years of turmoil, an ended marriage, but ultimately writing, think-tank leadership, White House service, and teaching. A more public life, a less secure one, not the life of a college professor I thought I would have.
And I ended up writing those words for Bill Clinton, with my colleagues over at the National Security Staff. And part of me thinks they were and are a cop out. A concession to a political reality that needs to be accommodated to elect a president to do things I thought were good. To the idea that force, technology, and global military deployment are somehow peace-giving. But a sacrifice of the human soul, at the same time.
In reality, this military has been an ineffective and less-than-useful tool. The stalemate in Korea, the loss in Vietnam, the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, the inverse relationship between the size of American counter-terror forces in Africa and the number of terrorists and terrorist attacks on that continent. Aside from 1991, when we use it in combat, we tend to lose it. Its utility as a deterrent force – we keep the peace just by being there – is almost impossible to prove and certainly eroding. That’s a longer discussion I have written about and will continue to.
But today I just worry about war and intervention and manhood talk. And the policy and human alternatives that are left on the table when we make chest-puffing into a policy in the expectation that it is politically necessary and popular.